Reverting to Poor Tom, well may the words of Dickens in Bleak House serve as a text for to-day: "There is not an atom of Tom's shrine, not a cubic inch of any pestilential gas in which he lives, nor an obscurity or degradation about him, nor an ignorance, nor a wickedness, nor a brutality of his committing, but shall work its retribution, through every order of society up to the proudest of the proud and the highest of the high." Whatever of permanence the ideal democracy which underlies our institutions may achieve, it will not be the survival of conditions such as these, but the fruition of their betterment. Recognition of the sinister elements involved determines the modern type of library work with children. That work rests upon a knowledge of the background which has been pictured, upon the use of methods that shall reach sanely and effectively the contributing causes, upon correlation of all the social forces that can be brought to bear unitedly. Recognition of conditions and causation gives power to, and justifies the modern trend of, library work with children as the most important and far-reaching of all its great work. Of thirty million men and women, and their children, who have come from Over-seas in two generations, 83 per cent were dwellers along the rim of the Mediterranean. Largely from that source have our towns grown overnight into swarming cities. Their children of to-day will be the men and women who in a generation will make or unmake the Republic. Ignorance and greed, rather than necessity, breed the chief menace in our national life. Alone as a detached social force, the library cannot hope to combat these, but in correlation with other forces may serve as one of the most potent agencies. In the children's rooms and in kindred places, the missionaries of the book take the disregarded bits of life about them and weave them into a human element of power. The children's rooms in the library and what they imply in the life of the people, are of such recent origin and growth that the complete force of their present-day work will not be fully apparent for a quarter century. What they hope to do, the instruments they purpose to use, are given succinctly in the pronouncement of one of our most progressive libraries OBJECTS OF LIBRARY WORK WITH CHILDREN To make good books available to all children of a community. To train boys and girls to use with discrimination the adult library. To reinforce and supplement the class work of the city schools (public, private, parochial and "Sunday" schools). To cooperate with institutions for civic and social betterment, such as playgrounds, settlements, missions, boys' and girls' clubs; and with commercial institutions employing boys and girls, such as factories, postoffice special delivery division, telegraph and telephone agencies and department stores.